A video journalist working for Agence France-Presse, the French news agency, was killed by rocket fire near the town of Chasiv Yar in eastern Ukraine, AFP said on Tuesday. Some of the heaviest battles of the war are being fought in and around the nearby city of Bakhmut.

The journalist, Arman Soldin, 32, and four colleagues were with Ukrainian soldiers when they came under a Grad rocket attack on Tuesday afternoon, the agency said. Soldin was killed. No one on the rest of the team, which included a security adviser, was injured.

Soldin is the 17th journalist to be killed in Ukraine since 2022, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. His death came just two weeks after a Ukrainian journalist was killed and an Italian journalist was injured in an attack on their way to the city of Kherson in southern Ukraine.

Soldin was one of the agency’s first journalists to arrive in Ukraine after Russia’s full-scale invasion.

Soldin also shared lighter moments from the front lines — last month, he rescued an injured hedgehog found after Russian shelling in Chasiv Yar. Soldin and his colleagues built a makeshift shelter for the hedgehog, whom they named Lucky.

New York Times News Service